HOROSCOPES

Aside from weather forecasting, although similarly accurate, the most popular form of fortune telling, available in newspapers, magazines, and a large variety of premium rate phone lines, is probably horoscopes. Although disguised by some guff about stars and planets, the underlying principle of astrology is that every single person in the world, all six billion of them, can be divided into one of only twelve personality types, essentially based on what month they were born in. This is clearly nonsense as, for a start, it’s already been scientifically proven that women fit into only one of five different personality types - posh, sporty, scary, baby or ginger - but not only that, the success of the whole industry does tend to rely on everyone reading them to fit into one specific personality type, that of the hugely gullible.

The ‘science‘, and we use the word in its loosest possible sense here, looser even than Amy Winehouse’s grip on reality, behind horoscopes claims that the relative movement of planets have a deep and abiding effect on your career, your downtime, and your lovelife, although this theory seems to have been extrapolated wildly after someone got a bit confused after hearing Mars’ old claims to help you work, rest and play. Indeed, given that if you’re the sort of person who actually takes astrology seriously it seems unlikely that people who actually know you care too much about how you live your life, so it’s hard to imagine a bunch of inanimate rocks, millions and millions of miles away whose only purpose in life is to go round and round in circles taking much of an interest in the minutiae of your promotion prospects and whether Thursday is a good day for romantic prospects for you.

In reality the whole industry is based solidly upon two factors, the vagueness of the predictions which allows them to get away with it and the insatiable urge of people to throw vast sums of money at premium rate phone lines which helps fund the practioners of the art, and it is a profitable business; any money which doesn’t go into drawing random lines on bits of paper and claiming that they’re star charts showing the passing of Mercury through Uranus - we couldn’t resist - goes straight into the pockets of the astrologer. For example, a typical reading might run “Capricorn: Today is a good day to keep your head down and get on with things. Sometimes the higher leaves aren’t worth stretching for. Red and seven for luck”, which covers pretty much everyone unless you’re a compulsive gambler or a giraffe, and a typical phone line runs at 60p a minute, minimum call time five minutes, please have your credit card handy.

MONORAIL

If there’s one thing we’ve learnt from a wasted youth spent watching rubbish sci-fi TV and films is that we should really have spent more time outside. But if there’s two things we’ve learnt then the other is that in the future everyone will wear silver and will spend much of their time when they’re not fighting space aliens/whiling away the hours until death in a bleak dystopia travelling around by monorail. Given that it has officially been the future since midnight on January 1st 2000, it’s been a constant source of disappointment to us that we have yet to travel by monorail. Indeed, it’s now a part of our routine to go out on New Year’s Day, searching the streets despondently in a search for a monorail station that we’re convinced should have sprung up overnight, only tiring of this quest when we the constant stream of catcalls, rude comments, and threats of violence made towards the silver catsuit that we’ve worn, naturally assuming that from this day this will be the dress of choice of all citizens of this planet, and not just Lovefoxxx from CSS, get too much for us and we go home sadly, once again let down by a world that fails to live up to the expectations a multimedia childhood has given us.

Our disappointment with this state of affairs isn’t just limited to our life’s refusal to become more like a TV show, but because we can’t understand why our enthusiasm for a monorail network has failed to catch on. Swift, sleek, and shiny, the only real drawback with the system is that the only real journey’s you can make on it are ones which involve going round in a circle. One way. But as virtually all journeys, unless you’re eloping, have just committed a murder or are a very unlucky bungee jumper, involve ending up back where you started anyway, we fail to see why this is a problem. If anything they’re more efficient as you get to travel straight from A to A without having to deal with the whole B thing, and as ‘B’ is, on a day to day basis, work, most people would be happy to fly straight through. In fact, according to our copious research, the only people who would be upset about the lack of B’s would be honey connoisseurs and apiary makers and these, frankly, are people who shouldn’t be allowed a vote in the most minor of matters, let alone the important world of monorail construction.

Sod it, we’re moving to Seattle. They now how to do mass transit properly, even if the only places you can go to from the station positioned outside your local branch of Starbucks is other branches of Starbucks.